Ondaatje Response

In the past year or so I've been very interested in the area called "Documentary Poetry." In high school, when my interest in poetry was first beginning to grow, I found an online article about Donald Rumsfeld being a "poet," while researching a project for English class. At the time I was confounded. Rumsfeld seemed to me certainly NOT a poet, but there it was, on the internet for the whole world to see. More than anything, I was captivated by the notion of an individual's words (even if they're Donald Rumsfeld's) constantly being extremely precise and poetic, which, being young and naive, I thought would be my modus operandi for a career as a world-famous poet. What I eventually gained from the Rumsfeld work was the notion of a reporting poetry, a poetry that, by using the everyday and a set of information thoughtfully, can revitalize poetry in the world today. Readers tend to seek out work that rewards them in someway -- my friend's mom reads Romantic poets because it is "fun stories" and she likes the meter; my friend reads Allen Ginsberg because he likes the social commentary and the outsider feeling he gets reading it. How can different elements of didacticism, narrative, entertainment, so on and so on... be harnessed by the poet?

As there's nothing new under the sun, when I eventually stumbled onto Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, I was glad to see there was someone trying to blur the lines. When I saw Rankine's reading last fall here at Pitt, I was extremely glad to see it being so capably handled. Somehow, in all of my reading and researching, I overlooked Ondaatje's The Collected Work of Billy the Kid until this class. I feel like Ondaatje's project is unique for its breadth and scope. I've read a memoir in verse, but never something as focused as Billy the Kid's mixed-media biography. Ondaatje manages to reveal Willam Bonney through various personal and second-hand details & accounts, pictorial evidence and even the lore that is the most familiar source of information on Billy the Kid. It is the way the Ondaatje manages to avoid cliche and legend in his project that interested me most after having read the book. Through consistent means of narrative, employing prose and verse, Ondaatje makes a credible and very human Willam Bonney. We see him with friends and lovers and in moments of terrible normalcy, like a calm evening. By avoiding the sensational, Ondaatje welcomes the reader into a more intimate relationship with the subject that any report or biography ever could.


Rumsfeld article: http://www.slate.com/id/2081042/
A good, recent blog about Documentary Poetry: http://kenyonreview.org/blog/?p=809